Charleston, S.C. — Everyone has a story. Gakire Katese Odile, better known as Kiki, is an artist, a mother and a self-described dreamer. As a teenager, pages of her story were ripped apart before she even knew to grieve them.
Kiki’s grandparents were killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide that claimed 800 thousand lives in 100 days. Her grandmother was murdered with a machete and left in a latrine. She remembers her mother crying daily.
Loss
But Kiki never knew her grandmother. She was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where her parents fled to keep their children safe. They moved back to Rwanda two years after the genocide.
“I didn’t want it to be home,” says Kiki. “I felt like it was a really sad country with very bad people.”
But the country was home to generations of Kiki’s family. She felt no connection, only emptiness.
She tried to visit her grandmother’s burial site. It was a mass grave. She wrote a commemoration for the families of genocide victims. It just caused them more pain.
Kiki wanted desperately to pull life from death.
“I said I want to put those skeletons, those bones in the memorial site, I want to put the flesh back,” says Kiki.
A grieving family gave Kiki an idea. They told her all they wanted was to see their loved one, one more time. Perhaps writing letters to those they lost would help them heal.
Letters
What flowed was a collection of 400 letters that inspired a play, “The Book of Life”. Kiki performed it last week as part of Spoleto Festival USA.
Kiki says she met first with widows of the genocide.
“And I remember that five of them left immediately and said, ‘You want us to write to dead people?'"
But dozens stayed.
“We spent time crying, laughing, remembering,” says Kiki.
Then she reached out to the children of men and women killed. They shared news of their budding lives.
“Don’t worry, I’ve grown up now. I finish university. I have a girlfriend I want to present to you.”
Kiki even spoke with jailed killers, asking them to write to people whose lives they took. She learned many had murdered without even knowing why.
She says the letters allowed survivors to say goodbye to people suddenly taken and feel again who they were before the loss; wives, children, friends and neighbors. The messages also humanized people whose lives are too often overshadowed by the brutality of their murders.
“The same way we were writing down the testimonies of death and how people were killed, we need to write down their smile,” says Kiki.
A Book of Life
The victims’ smiles, their lives, the love that still binds them to the living are celebrated in “The Book of Life.” The performance weaves the letters with songs and a fable about finding light in darkness.
It also features Rwanda’s first all-female drum ensemble called Ingoma Nshya. Women were long forbidden from even touching a drum, a symbol of power, but now out-number men following the genocide. They’re helping write the nation’s new narrative.
“The drumming, that is an explosion of life and joy,” explains Kiki.
Kiki says the emptiness she once felt began to fade when she wrote her own letter to her grandmother. She told the matriarch she never met she is a reminder.
“She reminds me every day that I was left to live,” says Kiki. “So, I’m going to live.”
Living, Kiki says, means embracing every page of her story, even those that are difficult or torn.
